The worst heartbreak and most riveting triumph of Anne Rice’s life happened in relatively quick succession, each beginning when the US novelist’s daughter – Michele, then about three – told her she was too tired to play.

Rice had never heard such a comment from a child that age, and subsequent blood tests ordered by a doctor revealed that her beloved “Mouse” had acute granulocytic leukemia, considered untreatable for her.

Mouse died in 1972 shortly before turning six. And as the devastating end neared, then the initial grief of losing her daughter, Rice mostly coped by huddling over her typewriter, crafting what became her first novel: the enduring classic Interview With the Vampire.

“I knew that writing was the only thing I could do, and when I wrote it was like fighting the darkness, pushing all the absurdity and horror away,” Rice later said of her novel about vampires fighting the complications of immortality, including a five-year-old girl inspired by Mouse.

When Rice was done, the first read went to her husband, Mouse’s father, the poet Stan Rice. Stan Rice once recounted how he read it in “approximately one sitting” and upon finishing it told himself: “Our life will never be the same.”

“And,” he said, “it never was.”

Indeed it was not. The bestselling book, released in 1976, inspired a movie starring Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and a young Kirsten Dunst, and more recently a Netflix series. It spurred sequels including Queen of the Damned and a Broadway musical scored by Elton John. It gained Rice international fame, a huge following and a fortune, the most visible reminder of which was one of the most recognizable mansions in her home town New Orleans: the old St Elizabeth’s orphanage.

Now, at AnneRice.com, that story and myriad other related ones are being retold in an anthology of documentaries being made available for streaming for free starting Thursday.

Anne Rice: An All Saints’ Day Celebration was helmed by her son, the author Christopher Rice, and his business partner and her close friend Eric Shaw Quinn. It contains archival footage, privately held photographs and new interviews, paying tribute to the literary titan who died at 80 toward the end of 2021 following a stroke. And it chronicles a live event in New Orleans at the beginning of November that celebrated Rice’s legacy.

Part of the documentary anthology, previewed by the Guardian, not only honors the role that the big sister Christopher Rice never met played in their mother’s career. It also explores the influence Rice had on authors who came after her, including the fantasy and romance novelist Jennifer Armentrout, who says on screen: “Many of us would not have the careers that we have now without her.”

And it unpacks the feeling of acceptance engendered through some of the characters she created in the early years of the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement, especially Lestat de Lioncourt and Louis de Pointe du Lac. In Rice’s debut as an author, that pair fashioned a family of sorts with their fellow vampire, the kindergarten-aged Claudia.

“When I was a kid reading Interview With the Vampire, I was a gay kid,” Rob Roth, the director of the Elton John-backed stage play Lestat, says in the anthology. “And the love between Lestat and Louis, just reading about it … made me feel better – like not so alone.”

Quinn, a novelist himself, says in the film that he encountered Interview while “going through one of the worst times in my life”.

“And it was like Anne reached out to me and said, ‘You are OK – exactly the way you are,’” Quinn remarks. “And you don’t have to apologize to anyone for it.”

The approach vaulted her to rarefied air. For instance, one of the anthology’s clips sees Rosie O’Donnell introducing Rice as a guest on her talkshow – and describing how the host, arguably at the peak of her career, waited five hours outside a bookstore for the author.

Christopher Rice, speaking with the Guardian recently, shared another anecdote he had otherwise guarded about the kinds of celebrities who would seek her out. Ozzy Osbourne left his mother backstage passes once when he was performing in New Orleans, but she didn’t attend, primarily preferring to spend her evenings – as her son put it – “in a Laura Ashley sundress eating crackers and cheese”.

Her absence from the performance so crushed Osbourne that when Christopher Rice and a friend tried to use the passes, the former Black Sabbath frontman refused them entry. “They wanted to meet Anne – that was that,” Christopher Rice said, laughing nostalgically.

Christopher Rice and Quinn said they also made it a point for viewers of their documentary anthology to hear from those who got a look behind the curtain of Anne’s public persona. One of the staples of that persona were coffins – to either arrive at book signings in or display in her imposing home at the north-east corner of Napoleon Avenue and Prytania Street in New Orleans.

One of the more humorous voices in Anne Rice: An All Saints’ Day Celebration is that of Amy Troxler, a religion schoolteacher in New Orleans who also worked as a part-time assistant to the author – and addresses those coffins in a distinctive local accent.

“There was a coffin in the living room, and I thought, ‘What is that coffin?’” a clearly befuddled Troxler says in one of the anthology’s documentaries. “‘What kind of people put coffins in their living room?’ It was a pretty coffin, though, I must say.”

If Christopher Rice and Quinn have their way, the anthology won’t be the final word on Anne. Her son said he and Quinn had been “reviewing the archive of Anne’s work, both published and unpublished, with an eye towards future publications and productions across many platforms.

“Stay tuned.”